RHYME SCHEME | STEVE KOWITPablo Neruda would like to 'Explain a Few Things' to you

September 23, 2007

It is likely that no poet of our era has been so widely read, revered and translated as Pablo Neruda, who died on Sept. 23, 1973, 34 years ago today. In 2003, Farrar, Straus and Giroux published a 996-page selection of Neruda's poetry translated by three-dozen American translators and edited by Ilan Stavans. Next month FSG will publish a much-abridged version under the title “I Explain a Few Things: Selected Poems” (bilingual; 355 pages, $16). Because translation is an impossible art and because Neruda is a particularly difficult poet to approximate in English, it is not altogether surprising that the translations themselves are not uniformly successful.

Given Neruda's pre-eminence, there are plenty of other versions to choose from, but almost all suffer from the same problem. In 2004, City Lights Books published “The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems,” edited by Mark Eisner (bilingual; 199 pages, $16.95). In 2005, New Directions published his Spanish Civil War poems under the title “Spain in My Heart,” translated by Donald Walsh (bilingual; 80 pages, $8). There's another useful volume of translations that Nathaniel Tarn edited for Houghton Mifflin in 1972 (“Neruda: Selected Poems,” (bilingual; 508 pages, $12.95). And those are only a few of the Neruda versions in English. In all these volumes there are renditions that are splendid and others that stumble occasionally with phrases that seem awkward, unidiomatic, flat or otherwise unconvincing.

I urge readers who want a taste of that poet's exuberant, endlessly fecund poetic genius to read the translations by Ben Belitt, originally published almost half a century ago by Grove Press and reprinted in 1994 as “Selected Poems: Pablo Neruda” (bilingual' 320 pages, $15). Belitt's consistently inspired, sumptuous versions have a velocity, freshness and authenticity that most other translators do not come close to achieving. The late Robert Creeley spoke of Ben Belitt as Neruda's “most enduring translator,” and I enthusiastically concur. Moreover, the lengthy introduction by Luis Monguió that accompanies Belitt's versions is as incisive an initiation into the poet's life and work as one is likely to find in English.

The struggle against Franco and the Spanish fascists – the heartless slaughter Neruda witnessed during Spain's civil war – galvanized his spirit and shaped him into the politically engaged “impure” poet he became. The title poem of the new selection, “I Explain a Few Things,” refers to the poet's explanation of that transformation. In Belitt's sizzling version, Neruda cries out at the end: Turncoats / and generals: / ... look well at the havoc of Spain / Would you know why his poems / never mention the soil or the leaves, / the gigantic volcanoes of the country that bore him? / Come see the blood in the streets, / come see/the blood in the streets, / come see the blood / in the streets!

There is little doubt that Neruda's death was hastened by the U.S.-sponsored coup that overthrew the elected democracy of Salvador Allende, Neruda's friend and political ally. “We shall do all within our power to condemn Chile and all Chileans to utmost deprivation and poverty,” declared U.S. Ambassador Ed Korry upon Allende's election, while Henry Kissinger explained, with Machiavellian fervor, that “The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.” The 17-year dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet that began on Sept. 11th, 1973, was – however much to Washington's liking – savage and bloody for the Chilean people. Shattered by the destruction of the democracy and already gravely weakened by leukemia, Neruda died 12 days after the coup.

It would be difficult to find a poet as different from Neruda as his fellow Chilean, Nicanor Parra. A former professor of physics at the University of Santiago, Parra, who is now 93 years old, is hilariously iconoclastic and relentlessly original. “Antipoems: How to Look Better and Feel Great” (bilingual; New Directions, 130 pages, $14.95), translated by Liz Werner, assembles his poems of the past three decades. But anyone wanting to discover why Parra is so admired will have to dig up the three out-of-print collections that New Directions published decades ago: “Poems and Antipoems,” “Emergency Poems” and “Antipoems: New and Selected.”

Parra's “antipoetry” eschews elaborate poetic rhetoric, opting instead for an idiom that's irreverent, comic and as crystal-clear as good prose. In “Manifesto,” translated by Miller Williams, Parra insists that The poets have come down from Olympus ... / We repudiate / The poetry of dark glasses / The poetry of the cape and sword / The poetry of the plumed hat. For any reader with a taste for the scathing and demotic, the best of Parra's verse is a must read. Here is “Young Poets,” this one, too, translated by Miller Williams. To my taste it's the best advice to apprentice poets ever offered:

Write as you will / in whatever style you like / Too much blood has run under the bridge / To go on believing / That only one road is right. / In poetry everything is permitted. / With only this condition, of course: / You have to improve on the blank page.

Steve Kowit translated Pablo Neruda's final book, “Incitement to Nixonicide and Praise for the Chilean Revolution.” Published in 1979 and illustrated by exile Chilean artists, it is long out of print.